Book Description

Not just a critique of marriage but one of the best books EVER on romantic relationships and how they really work.
What do people want from love? How do they think marriage will help them,
and what does it really give them?

Marriage is all about love, right? Actually, it’s more about money.
Behind the romantic language, marriage is primarily a financial agreement
merging the assets and liabilities of two individuals into a
single corporate entity.
After your wedding, the money you earn and debts you
incur are no longer legally yours; they belong to the marital “community”—a common
pot that both of
you contribute to and draw from. It’s a lot like Communism: an idealistic sharing of resources and risks supposedly for the common good.

What could go wrong with this plan? Pretty much the same things that brought down
political Communism in the late 20th Century: It slows growth, suppresses initiative, dilutes responsibility and mires decisions in bureaucracy. Healthy relationships need clear boundaries, and marriage erases too many of them at once.

Marriage was designed for medieval times. Back then, life was hard and short; most marriages were arranged, and a woman was essentially the property of her husband. Marriage was a sort of licensing system for sex and childbirth. Once the relationship was officially approved and the religious ceremony concluded, the couple's overriding goal was to produce as many children as possible, knowing that many would die.

Times have changed. Birth control, longer lifespans, sexual freedom and women’s rights have rewritten the rules of matrimony. Under the laws of most Western countries, marriage is no longer a sex license or child-rearing contract, only a contract to merge financial resources.
“It’s only money,” couples may say, but Glenn Campbell argues that love and money are separate issues that should be kept that way.

In modern Western society, unmarried people can legally have sex, live together, raise children, buy property together and do nearly everything else associated with a committed relationship, so why do they need to marry at all? What are you really getting when you walk down the aisle? Is marriage merely a public announcement to make your relationship “official,” or does it fundamentally change the relationship?

With simple, powerful and accessible arguments, The Case Against Marriage
explains why, if you truly love someone, marriage may not be the wisest way to show it.

Why Turkish? (The author does not speak Turkish himself.) Glenn Campbell wrote most of the book in 2007 but got frustrated with marketing it. Instead he put it on his
website and forgot about it. The Turkish publisher found it there in 2012 and decided it was appropriate for the Turkish market. Having an actual published book got the author motivated
to revisit the project in English. In early 2013, he re-edited the manuscript for a revised English edition.

Note: The Turkish translation is based on an earlier version of the manuscript. The English version is more up-to-date and includes a few new chapters.

“Glenn Campbell is one of my heroes. With the Groom Lake Desert Rat he dragged UFO craziness and the world's most popular top secret air force base into pop consciousness. Now, he does for marriage what he did with Area 51 - i.e., blow that shit outta the water...”—Scott Christian Carr (author of "Champion Mountain")

Glenn Campbell has worn
many hats over the years, including programmer, photographer, philosopher, perpetual traveler and agnostic UFO researcher.
In the 1990s, he was an often-televised expert on Area 51, the secret
military base in the Nevada desert. (Profiled in The New York Times.) If you have heard the name "Area 51", it is due in part
to his early efforts to publicize the base when it was unknown to the mainstream media.
In the early 2000s, Glenn shifted his attention to Family Court in Las Vegas, where he
become the self-appointed "Family Court Guy," studying divorce, delinquency and child
welfare cases as an outside observer.
(Profiled in the Las Vegas Sun
and interviewed on public radio.)
Sitting in on hundreds of court cases and writing about them later,
Glenn began to refine the philosophical ideas
expressed in
his books. You can't really know love, he says, until you understand
how and why it falls apart.

Glenn has a massive oeuvre of work available online, including hundreds of essays and videos and thousands of photos from around the world. He tweets as
@BadDalaiLama and posts new travel photos
almost every day to his public Facebook page. Here are some starting links to his work relating to marriage:

Glenn-Campbell.com - Glenn's home page.
See here for links to all of his public work, including hundreds of essays and videos and thousands of
photos. (Or use the menu at the top of this
page.)

“After marriage, husband and wife become two sides of a coin; they just can't face each other, but still they stay together.” —Hermant Joshi

“Marriage is not a word; it is a sentence” —Oscar Wilde

“Any intelligent woman who reads the marriage contract, and then goes into it, deserves all the consequences.” —Isadora Duncan

“Almost no one is foolish enough to imagine that he automatically deserves great success in any field of activity; yet almost everyone believes that he automatically deserves success in marriage. —Sydney Harris

“On rare occasions one does hear of a miraculous case of a married couple falling in love after marriage, but on close examination it will be found that it is a mere adjustment to the inevitable.” —Emma Goldman

“The only cure for love is marriage” —Anonymous

“Marriage resembles a pair of shears, so joined that they cannot be separated, often moving in opposite directions, yet always punishing anyone who comes in between them,” —Sydney Smith

“Marriage is a good deal like a circus: there is not as much in it as is represented in the advertising.” —Edgar Watson Howe

“The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.” —Peter de Vries

“Marriage is like life: it is a field of battle, not a bed of roses.” —Robert Louis Stevenson

“Marriage is the tomb of love.” —Casanova

“There would be more good marriages if the marriage partners didn't live together.” —Friedrich Nietzsche

“Marriage is an attempt to solve problems together which you didnt even have when you were on your own.” —Eddie Cantor

“In marriage, a man becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being.” —Robert Louis Stevenson

“Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.” —Honore De Balzac